Determining The Test Conditions

The initial step is the development of a representative Mission/Life Cycle Profile, by determining the most stressful environmental conditions and durations of stress that the system will experience during its life cycle. For systems that have multiple missions and/or environmentally distinct mission phases, thorough environmental simulation during the reliability growth testing is often impractical. In these cases, the reliability growth test combined environments should almost always include temperature cycling and vibration as a minimum, along with operational stresses such as on/off cycling and variation in inputs (e.g., line voltage) and outputs (e.g., loads).